With Toyota ready to make big moves with its 2015 FCV, the Japanese government is ready with their own big move: $20,000 USD in incentives.

Autoblog Green reports the government will offer buyers of the hydrogen-powered sedan $20,000 in subsidies, which may bring down the reported $69,000 MSRP down to $49,000; EV subsidies in Japan max out at $8,500 per vehicle for comparison.

Meanwhile, the FCV will likely sell for $50,000 in the United States when it leaves the container ships next summer, and will be joined by Honda’s own FCV — name to be determined later — sometime in 2015.

Please vote accordingly next time some moronic US politician starts regurgitating lobbyist drivel about subsidies and unfair competition; as if having a bunch of Japanese saps pitch in to make your car cheaper, is somehow a bad thing.

The Japanese economic machine drove world trade in the 80’s. The economic miracle was powered by government subsidies to favored industrial sectors. Wealth led to RE “investments” in California and Hawaii. Books were written by econs USA touting the way forward was to emulate the Japanese. Then came the market crash of 1992 and the Japanese economy remains stalled 22 years later.

I’d be interested to hear what the Japanese media is making of this. And all because whoever designed the Fukushima nuclear plant didn’t build it 10m higher up the hill. Where are they going to get the H2? Still, it’ll be interesting to see how their plans pan out given that so many other governments are talking about making the same appalling mistake.

Most of the rest of the world makes hydrogen from natural gas, something I don’t think Japan has all that much of.

Problem #2 is that how do you distribute the hydrogen? Pumping it into high pressure delivery trucks is expensive and consumes lots of energy. The only alternative I can think of is to build a pipeline to each and every retail point, which sounds awfully pricey.

So it would be like a Tesla Supercharger network, maybe. Depending on how many cars you sold, and in what region, you could set up hydrogen fueling stations at already existing gas stations as needed, at the buyer’s home(?), and, I assume, at Toyota dealers.

The current process of producing hydrogen from natural gas is a high temperature industrial process, and it is extremely unlikely to be done at someone’s home or at a car dealership. A fueling station that made its own hydrogen would be a significant investment, and if that’s how hydrogen cars get fueled, I would expect there would be a few large stations widely separated.